Christmas, 2023

(The following is the Readers' Digest condensed version of the message I had planned to preach at Calvary Church yesterday. Last Thursday I tested positive for Covid, so preaching was off the table. So I offer this as a Christmas meditation and invitation. Merry Christmas -- Leo) 

Santa Claus is coming to town and he knows if we’ve been good or bad, so be good for goodness sake!

That’s basically Christmas gospel for most of us because most of us like to think of ourselves as basically good people. Of course, we measure good comparatively. We may not be perfect but we’re good compared to the bad people who infamously make the news; or people whose morality is beneath our own—at every level. Even those who are unchurched and make no particular claim to virtue compare themselves favorably with all the hypocrites in church. We can all find something good about ourselves that somehow raises us above the crowd and cancels out or diminishes the evil we have done.

We may think of ourselves as basically good people but what if the stakes were significantly higher. What if it isn’t Santa who’s coming to town, but Jesus. Jesus did promise to come again. The old creed declares that “…Jesus sits at the right hand of the father; from thence he will come again to judge the living and the dead.”

And what if our goodness isn’t good enough. Or what goodness isn’t even the main issue? The Bible says: “Strive for peace with everyone, and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord” (Hebrews 12:14 ESV).

While we may consider ourselves to be good, I don’t know anyone who would seriously declare themselves to be holy. Holiness implies a vastly different standard. We instinctively know that holiness has an inescapable God-connection. Compared to others, we may be good. Compared to God, none of us is holy.

And yet that very admission becomes a tacit acknowledgment of our disqualification from God’s Kingdom.

Apparently being good enough isn’t good enough. If we want to see God, we must also be holy. But we have already admitted we are not.

So we have a problem. Whatever holiness is, we admit we don’t have it. And without it—without holiness—no one will see the Lord. We’re excluded from his holy presence. Forget being good enough. By our own ready admission none of us are holy enough!

Christmas is God’s response to our unholiness. At Christmas a holy child came down from heaven to make us holy.

When Gabriel announced Jesus’ conception to Mary, he told her: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God” (Luke 1:35 ESV).

In Jesus, God reached across the vast divide between majesty and mortality, and holiness took on human flesh. Jesus was perfect in holiness. His whole existence as a man was consecrated wholly to God. He was indeed the Holy One of God.

Which is pretty amazing when you think abut it. Jesus lived his entire life among us and maintained perfect holiness all the time. Not as some weird ascetic, living off by himself in a wilderness cave, but fully engaged in life—all of human society as we live it.

His reputation was such that those religious leaders who considered themselves professionally holy were offended that Jesus, in their opinion, loved to party. They thought he ate too much and drank too much and hung out with the wrong crowd.

Jesus, the Holy One of God, taught us that holiness had little to do with keeping external rules and regulations, what you ate or didn’t eat, or the people you got next to. Jesus said the stuff that makes us unclean and unholy is in our hearts. 

That’s why, by the way, we are able to make goodness relative. With us, goodness is about doing good things most of the time compared to other people. We instinctively know that holiness is another matter entirely, and that our truest inner self isn’t holy. It’s messy. A lot of it isn’t even nice. All kinds of ugly stuff goes on inside our hearts and minds, our fantasies and longings. That’s why we rightly shy away from claiming to be holy.

Jesus was absolutely holy, inside and out! Everything Jesus did was holy. As a result, Jesus could offer himself as the perfect, holy sacrifice that alone could purify corrupted human hearts like ours and make us holy. Listen to what the Bible says: “And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him…” (Colossians 1:21–22 ESV).

Jesus is the Holy One from God who came to make us holy. This means that if you are a follower of Jesus—if you have trusted Jesus to rescue you from your guilt and become your life-Leader, if you have received God’s gracious gift of forgiveness—Jesus makes you clean. In him you are holy—consecrated to God. That’s why the Bible calls us saints. No matter what was in your past, Jesus changes everything. 

This also means that if you are not a follower of Jesus, if you have not yet received God’s forgiveness by faith in Jesus, your impure, unholy heart disqualifies you from seeing God in his perfect holiness, 

Jesus is really good news. Jesus can wash your heart and your soul and make you pure and holy.

“Without holiness, no one can see the Lord.” 

That little verse is a heart-stopper! It demolishes my pretensions of being good enough for heaven with the blunt trauma of my own accusation against myself that whatever else I may be, I am not holy, not fit for heaven. What will we do when we stand exposed before God in the awesome majesty of his holiness?

Jesus is the Holy One from God who came to make unholy people like us holy—fit for heaven. Jesus absorbed everything in us that is impure and unholy in his own body when he died on the cross, and took it out of the way completely. Everything our unholiness deserved, Jesus took upon himself. For those willing to receive him, Jesus offers to wash us clean on the inside and make us holy, people who are set apart, special for God. 

Of all the gifts you may get this Christmas, nothing matches the gift of the holy child, Jesus. Just as you receive presents from family and friends, why not receive the gift of holiness? Without it, no one can see the Lord. Why go without? Let Jesus give you your greatest gift ever this Christmas, the awesome gift of pardon, forgiveness and holiness—the assurance that one day you will stand before God’s throne, not shrinking in mortal dread, but holy and blameless and free from accusation!